Email This Page to Someone

Your Name

Your Email

Message Included

Remember My Information

Recipient Name

Recipient Email

=>

This week, supporters of religious freedom cheered the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. The Court was correct to protect business owners from being forced to violate their religious beliefs by paying for contraceptives. However, the decision was very limited in scope and application.

The Court’s decision only applies to certain types of businesses, for example, “closely-held corporations” that have a “sincere” religious objection to paying for contraceptive coverage. Presumably, federal courts or bureaucrats will determine if a business’s religious objection to the mandate is “sincere” or not and therefore eligible for an opt-out from one Obamacare mandate.

Opponents of the Court’s decision are correct that a religious objection does not justify a special exemption from the Obamacare contraception mandate, but that is because all businesses should be exempt from all federal mandates. Federal laws imposing mandates on private businesses violate the business owners’ rights of property and contract.

Mandated benefits such as those in Obamacare also harm those employees who do not need or want them. Benefit packages resulting from negotiations between employers and employees are much more likely to satisfy both the employer and employee than benefit packages imposed by politicians and bureaucrats.

Opponents of the Court’s decision argue that Obamacare gives employees a “right” to free birth control that trumps the employers’ property rights. This argument confuses rights with desires. Successfully lobbying the government to force someone else to grant your wishes does not magically transform a desire into a “right.”

Redefining rights as desires to be fulfilled by the government also means that the government can modify, limit, or even take away those rights. After all, since your rights are gifts from government, there is no reason why you should object when the government takes away those rights for the common good.

Those who believe Congress can create a right to free contraception that overrides property rights should consider that the government may use that power to create and take away rights in ways they find objectionable. For example, if our rights are gifts from the government, then there is no reason why Congress should not limit our right to privacy by allowing the NSA to monitor our phone calls and Internet use.

The politicization of healthcare benefits is a direct result of government policies that not only encourage people to think of healthcare as a right, but to expect their employers to provide health insurance. Government policies encouraging over-reliance on third-party payers is the root of many of our healthcare problems.

Opponents of the Hobby Lobby decision are correct when they say that their bosses should not decide whether their healthcare plans cover contraceptives. However, like all supporters of Obamacare, they are incorrect in seeking to fix the problems with healthcare through more government intervention. Instead, they should join those of us working to create a free-market healthcare system that gives individuals control of their healthcare dollars. In a true free market, individuals would have the ability to obtain affordable healthcare without having to rely on government mandates or subsidies.

The debate over which, if any, businesses deserve an exemption from Obamacare’s contraception mandate is rooted in a misunderstanding of property and contract rights. All businesses and all Americans deserve an exemption not just from Obamacare, but from all mandates. Individuals should be given the freedom and responsibility to obtain the healthcare coverage that meets their needs without relying on the government to force others to provide it.

“Federal laws imposing mandates on private businesses violate the business owners’ rights of property and contract.”

Then presumably federal non-discrimination laws do the same thing, leaving one to believe a private business should be able to racially discriminate against prospective employees as well as customers.

Why is this opinion piece about a relatively narrow matter when it should be about Congressman Paul’s stance against most civil rights legislation?

Similarly, if one can have a court-approved “sincere” belief that contraception is wrong, surely one could have equally sincere a belief in not renting an apartment or loaning money to people based on their race. Why should they be deprived of an exemption from this federally imposed mandate?

Why should “religious” views be any more sacred– and now, thanks to the Roberts court, carry more legal weight — than ANY sincerely held beliefs?

Why aren’t you excoriating Justice Scalia for his stark contradiction and inconsistency between this ruling and his previous opinion regarding the religious right to ingest peyote and not be subjected to employer intrusions into their private lives?

Stop fooling yourself that this terrible ruling is some victory for personal freedoms.

Wesley Clark has always been a politically-correct leftist. Notice he said nothing about putting in camps foreign nationals who both are here illegally and commit felonies such as murder within our borders. It is incredible to me that this man was a general. If we have many more generals like ...

One additional piece of information regarding the near-nuclear-war episode that you mention is that he almost started a huge war due his personal failure to secure Pristina Airport in Kosovo against a take-over by the Russians. He failed militarily, then got angry and wanted to hit back at Russi...

I can't believe no one has mentioned Donald Trump. He is at the top of the GOP "heap" and riding firmly on migration and for what he's proposing he'll definitely need a camp or two. Whitey will soon be in the minority and he won't go quietly for he is the meanest SOB in the Valley. War with Mexic...

Hold off on your generous appraisal of Standard Oil -- they played both sides of the war in the quest for profits, just like Israel did in the Iran-Iraq war ---
re Standard Oil -- Robert Lovett, pleading the case for adopting anti-personnel bombs loaded with napalm and white phosphorous, ...

And what does the establishment hate and want gone? Whites that’s who. Look how both parties support illegal immigration, along with Silicon Valley elites, Chambers of Commerce, the intelligentsia. All of them are on board with this. They want to create a new world where the whites are stripped...

Well according to a DHS report when Napolitano was running it, problematic or disloyal Americans include Constitutionalists, White Christians holding traditional beliefs, gun owners critical of the government among others.
So it's not based in fear but fact.

Good for Standard Oil, the Germans had every right to defend themselves, Standard Oil had every right to sell them their products.
And do wake up, there was no 'extermination of Jews'. Spit out the bait you have bitten upon.

Clark makes no mention of apartheid Israel's 21st century ethnic purity program, of course.
Ahem.
Wesley Clark comes from ‘a long line of rabbis’
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/20574/wesley-clark-comes-from-a-long-line-of-rabbis/

We don’t have to worry about radicalized foreigners if we don’t grant them permission to live in the USA.
The topic of the article is “disloyal Americans” being put into interment camps, but obviously that doesn’t stop the paranoid tighty whiteys from ranting about brown people.

Clark recalled the internment of American citizens during World War II who were merely suspected of having Nazi sympathies. He said: “back then we didn’t say ‘that was freedom of speech,’ we put him in a camp.”
Considering Standard Oil sold a fuel additive to the Nazi war machine dur...

I am rather surprised and more than a little disappointed that Ron Paul would even deem this subject as something to be discussed. First of all, let's cut the bullshit with each other (as if such a thing is possible) and use the more accurate term: Concentration Camp.
The WWII Concentration...

Clark is totally un-American.
who is Clark for, then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tL7lHkqVek
"One of the generals called me in ... we made the decision ... on the 20th of September ... we are going to war with Iraq ... we don't know what to do about terrorists but we know how to t...

Clark has pretty much let his mask slip off now that he isn't in his former position anymore or running for office. What's been revealed is dismal; he really hid his true views very well for all these years. If anyone is a radical it's him and if anyone should be interned for that it would him. C...

Internment camps and across-the-border deportation for all illegal aliens, not American citizens. I'd be tempted to make exceptions for the real "traitors" like Wesley Clark, Jeb Bush, Adelson, Zuckerman, Soros, AIPAC members, etc.

Ron Paul is the sort of patriot which once was the norm, not the exception, in American public life. He's lucky that marginalization was the worst that happened to him. It will take a miracle if we're ever to see another one like him.

Bingo!!!!
He's not interested in fighting terrorism or drug cartels. That's why he omits the need to secure the borders and enforce immigration law.
Clark means his fellow whites.
People don't get, that to make the rank he did, you have to be a complete tool of the establishment. Your views, o...

In law enforcement, you often tolerate lower levels of criminal activity in order to take down the larger figures or crimes. When combating organized crime and the mafia, for example, the police and FBI tolerate don't enforce minor organized crime activity strictly, but tolerate it in order to be...